The Commons Digest (11/18/2021)

The COmmons Insider Newsletter

Welcome to the seventh issue of The Commons digest!

This is our bi-weekly round-up of community news, relevant content and anything that can help us level up together. As always, reach out if you have any feedback or if you’d like anything featured in here. Now onto the update 👇

Insights we’re pondering 💭

Just. Get. Started. That’s one of our biggest takeaways from Christian Keil’s excellent profile of Packy McCormick from a few weeks ago. Packy is of course the author and creator of Not Boring, a business strategy and trends newsletter that has evolved into a community, investing syndicate, job board and VC fund.

The most striking anecdote in Christian’s article is that, for all its explosive growth, Packy’s ambitions were much more modest to start. When the pandemic struck, for example, he had a goal of basically doubling his newsletter audience from just under 500 subscribers to 1,000 by the end of 2020. (He’s at over 87,000 today).

One of the recurring themes we see at The Commons is that success is an iterative process. Whether you’re embarking on a job search, beating your head against the wall trying to master SQL or working to build a new marketplace in that newly-landed job, odds are the end goal feels impossibly large.

The workaround? Start. Every massive company, every person who has your dream job and practically every endeavor worth doing is the result of an initial step towards momentum. You’ll have to put in the work, to be sure. But odds are there is an initial step, some quantum of progress you can make, that will put the prospect of success within your reach.

Community Spotlight 💡

Today we’re featuring Jonathan Femi-Cole. Earlier this week, Jonathan started a new role as a Product Owner at Neo Financial, and we couldn’t be happier for him.

Jonathan has had product on his radar ever since joining one of our Strategy + Operations Sprints last year. And, having seen his work in our inaugural product strategy sprint, we know firsthand how well suited he is to a role like this. Jonathan also has one of the most intense work ethics we’ve ever seen - in case grad school, The Commons and a new role wasn’t enough, he’s also a professional football player 🏈

Neo is a challenger bank that has been on an absolute tear lately. We first got to know the company through James Nauss, Neo’s Head of Product & Strategy, who led a guest lecture to our community earlier this year. We highly recommend checking them out if you are interested in fintech (in addition to hiring Jonathan, they have several other product roles open).

Events @ The Commons 📆

  • Wednesday November 17: Yesterday we kicked off our latest Product Operations Sprint, led by Wafic and Marco. Welcome to our latest Sprinters!

  • This evening we’re also going to host the kickoff for our Growth Marketing Sprint led by Kareem and Jill. We’re really looking forward to welcoming more amazing people into our community. Please be sure to say hi to our newest community members in the #intros channel.
  • We have two IRL community meetups in the works 👀
  • Toronto on December 8th (more details to follow, but in the meantime save the date!)
  • New York City on December 10th, hosted by Andrew Yeung and Eric Liou 🚀 (Open to extended members of the The Commons community as well - reach out to us or reply to this email if you’re interested in attending). Andrew will also give more detail in his excellent newsletter, which you can find here.

#community-wins 🥇

We celebrated some more hiring announcements:

  • Khaled Eniba recently joined DoorDash in Strategy & Operations! Khaled is working on the logistics team, which is the perfect fit - after doing an incredible job in our Strategy + Operations Sprint, we were lucky enough to have him stick around as a data & analytics mentor 🏃
  • Mahbod Haghighi will be joining Clutch in a Strategy & Operations role 🚗
  • As mentioned above, Jonathan just started a new role as Product Owner at Neo Financial 💳

Be sure to reach out to them with a word or two of congratulations!

One Helpful Resource


Today we want to tell you about our friends at Omna, a boutique search firm that specializes in placing consultants, bankers and operators into BizOps and finance roles at startups.

They do a monthly jobs drop newsletter and it’s really good (no doubt because they handle mandates for a ton of great companies). Check out their newsletter right here.

Job Opportunities 💼

  • Synctera is hiring for a number of roles, including payment operations, product management, customer implementation and many more. Reach out to Strachan Wilson if any of these seem interesting to you.
  • Uber Freight is hiring a business analyst. This is equivalent to a Strategy & Ops associate position, but with a focus on a fast-growing vertical within the company. Wafic is happy to refer the right candidates.
  • Fast is hiring a BizOps generalist for its partnerships team. A great opportunity for a business generalist looking for an initial foray into tech. Reach out to us if you’d like an intro.
  • Clutch is on a hiring spree, which probably has something to do with the $100M Series B it recently closed. Open positions include General Manager and Strategy & Ops Manager roles. Reach out to Abhi Shetty if you’d like to learn more.
  • Xendit (YC unicorn, Stripe for SE Asia) is on a tear as well, hiring for roles that include Growth Strategy & Analytics, BizOps and Product Management. Reach out to Shawn Wu if you’re interested!
  • Khaled's team at DoorDash is hiring a Strategy & Operations Associate for logistics. Reach out to him if you’re interested.
  • Snackpass is hiring a product specialist. Reach out to us if you’d like an intro.
  • RenoRun is hiring a Business Analyst for its Customer Retention group. Reach out to Tom Tanguay-Sabourin if this interests you.
  • Deel is hiring for several partnerships roles! Parth Arora has the plug.
  • Twitch is hiring a Strategy Manager in San Francisco.

Head on over to #job-openings in our Slack community to see more openings like these!

One (community) Thing

Last week we welcomed Clover, Laura (our Ops & Community Manager)’s new roommate, and the newest member of the team at The Commons.

Couldn’t be happier to have you aboard, Clover ❤️

That’s all for this issue ✌️ If you’d like to access more news and content before the next update, you can hop on over to Slack.

Interested in more?
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